I’m a bit sore today as a result from bowling with friends last night. I think it had been two years since I had last bowled a game. Your dormant muscles must get a little pissed off when you wake them up and demand that they perform for you like a chimp playing a xylophone.
Definitely our playing resulted in few highlights. One of our party made a strike on her very last time up. I think I picked up one spare. The three of us had a combined score of something like 223. That means the pros won’t be calling anytime soon. But it was fun and even though I’m a little sore, I can be grateful I didn’t meet the fate of a young bowling alley employee I read about in an Oklahoma Department of Health report.
“A 17-year old bowling facility worker died from injuries received on October 13, 2001, when he was caught in a pinsetter machine. Although he was employed by the bowling facility, he was not working at the time of the incident, but was bowling with friends.”
This employee had only worked at the alley for three weeks and he apparently tried to manually re-set a pin in the 45-year-old machine.
“He tossed the pin toward the back of the machine where it struck the pincushion, thereby causing the machine to automatically cycle. The rake lowered from its resting position and then swept backward toward the rear of the machine, performing its normal operative function by sweeping the bowling pins to the back of the machine to be automatically sorted and framed. The arm of the rake caught the worker, crushing his head against the machine’s frame when it struck him,” the report said.
Talk about your freak accidents! If that bowling alley has not been sued out of existence, I bet that story gets told and retold among those bowling its lanes.